The Antihero
Knicks Fans
Didn’t Deserve

By W. M. | 22 July 2022 | 3-Minute Read

Monday 10 April 2022, 09:18 PM in Madison Square Garden, Manhattan. The last game of the regular season for the New York Knicks. Obi Toppin just scored 42 points in front of a capacity crowd. Yet, as the final buzzer sounded, only one thought came to mind: this season was trash.

Expectations entering the 2021-22 season, however, were skyscraper-high for the Knicks. Beyond doubt, their inspiring performance in the first round of the 2021 playoffs planted the seeds for a franchise renaissance. The Knicks’ subsequent offseason - the unmistakable zenith of basketball decision-making - sparked a level of bravado among Knicks fans that had become mostly unfamiliar to them. With former All-Star Kemba Walker coming home to the Mecca to lead the Knicks, the new Bing Bong era seemed primed for success. A point guard was the missing piece, and New York had found their man. 

Looking past the Knicks’ effective marketing campaign around their homecoming star, the season opener against the Boston Celtics made it clear that Walker’s 11th NBA season would devolve into a retirement tour rather than culminate in the pinnacle of his career. The point guard struggled through the first month of the season, as did the group. With the Knicks falling out of the playoff picture, Tom Thibodeau decided to permanently bench Walker, thus creating a point guard vacuum at the head of the starting lineup.

Enter MJ Burks.

Amid the team’s disastrous start, Alec Burks had been - in his role - one of the Knicks’ best players. On 29 November 2021, the back-up guard was officially promoted to the starting lineup, despite having never played the point guard position. A gift and a curse. Led by the two most inefficient 20 points per game scorers in the NBA, the Knicks saw their season spiral down a pit of despair and pointlessness. As the losses piled, many fans were quick to bring up the point guard position to explain the struggles of their team. Advanced statistics, however, painted a different picture.

You see, there are two kinds of people in the world today.
We have the players, and we have the player haters.
Please don't hate me because I'm beautiful baby.

The face of nonchalance, Burks played the game in Prada silk robes and Gucci slippers. A stark contrast with the perpetual issue-forcers who led the team in scoring, the veteran guard brought an air of lightness and luxury to the hardwood floor of the Garden, with each pull-up three swishing a sense of poetry into the Knicks’ dystopian offense, his game as effortless as his teammates’ commitment to defense. Lay-ups? He believed this form of expression belonged to peasants.

Provocative in essence, possibly by design, Burks’s play was the fine work of art of an obscure artist. One who fell short of the MoMA and Met, but whose brushstrokes conveyed a form of extravagance only the talented can afford.

Beyond his stylistic virtues, and by every advanced metric, the Suave God was a net positive for Tom Thibodeau’s team in each of the past two seasons, whether as one of the leaders of the bench unit - which drove the Knicks’ success in 2020-21 and kept the team afloat in 2021-22 - or as the Knicks’ emergency starting point guard.

A solid defender, an elite 3-point shooter and a respectable shot creator, Burks offered qualities that define the best role players in the modern NBA, in spite of his limitations. He provided the floor spacing that RJ Barrett and Julius Randle supposedly need to succeed, since it seemingly cannot be expected of them to provide any semblance of shooting themselves. Which begs the question: Why wasn’t Burks unanimously appreciated by Knicks fans?

Player Hater, Hater.
Player Hater, Hater.
Player Hater, Hater.

Amid the disappointment of the Knicks’ failed 2021-22 campaign, MJ Burks emerged as a nihilistic icon. A cult hero for the realist who has fully accepted that the Knicks are, indeed, doomed. Or, inversely, a scapegoat.

Unbeknownst to the optimist, unreasonable expectations breed rage. When it is impossible to reconcile the reality of losing with the high hopes placed upon the most mediocre of NBA players, someone needs to be nailed to the cross. It is the terror of Knicks fans.

Jalen Brunson - the Knicks’ latest big summer acquisition to be set up to fail in New York - will undoubtedly bring stability to the point guard position, a role that Burks was never fit to play. A good NBA player, Brunson is what any sane individual would consider an upgrade. Nevertheless, and independently of his imperfection, Burks brought qualities to the court that helped the team, even as he played out of position. His play did not excuse other players for their shortcomings, but instead highlighted them.

Burks came to New York free of expectations. In two seasons, he largely outperformed his contracts, yet never brought false promises of stardom. As a former colleague once advised me in the corridor of this modernist office: always underpromise, and over-deliver. Burks was a decent man, for he did not dare ask me to dream. On 28 June 2022, in a trade with the Detroit Pistons, he was liberated from the Knicks, my eyes filled with envy.